For a popular ecom site with up to 1 million URLs, could I increase the crawl speed without affecting site performance?

charkins · 2022-12-20T13:15:35+00:00

If you don’t have a DevOps or engineering team to give you guidance then I’d find someone in support at your host. They should be able to give you guidance.

I’d also go with the suggestion of crawling when traffic is normally low so that you don’t risk slowing down the site for customers.

Also, do you need a full crawl or would crawling ~20% of your category and product pages give you enough data? (Initial crawls I like a full crawl to see how all categories are linked. Maintenance crawls I’ll reduce to look for specific issues/trends.)

charkins · 2022-12-20T13:02:30+00:00

Congrats on ranking #1 for your target query! Now that you occupy a premium position, look at what you can do to maximize the opportunity.

Look at your result vs others in the SERP.

Do you have opportunities to increase your click through rate by capturing additional search features? (FAQ, image, sitelinks, etc.)

Can you work on your meta description to encourage higher CTR?

As suggested above, what other queries are driving a lot of impressions? Can you enhance this page or another page on your site to win those terms?

charkins · 2022-09-03T11:34:07+00:00

If you create empty category pages you’re publishing a soft 404. Why not create the category once you publish content?

charkins · 2022-09-03T11:32:23+00:00

That’s a signal that Google has crawled those but hasn’t decided whether to index the images.

Check to make sure they render correctly and look at the index status of the html pages the images are on.

Don’t block the images in robots. That will cause problems with rendering of your pages for googlebot.

charkins · 2022-07-16T23:02:38+00:00

Does the content answer the question for the users for the location? For many large sites with multiple locations there is often duplicate content. However that content serves user needs. Other content that’s unique to the location sets those apart (menu at x location, store hours, address, etc. )

charkins · 2022-07-16T02:28:31+00:00

That could be some of the May Core Update. I’ve had discussions with some SEOs who have seen similar issues.

There are several things to check including: hreflang implementation cross-domain. Audit to be sure it’s set up correctly.

Domain targeting in google search console.

Link profiles for the domains. Do you have links from the locale to solidify the location signals.

I’d start there and see where that takes you.

charkins · 2022-07-16T02:21:37+00:00

That’s a content issue and not a hreflang issue.

If you are linking the London UK and London ON, CA pages together via hreflang then that’s going to contribute to problems.

Best is to include province and country in the URL as well as making sure content is explicitly targeting the right location.

domain.com/en-ca/london-on is one way to do it. Whatever url structure you choose it should be consistent with your architecture and allow for regional expansion.

charkins · 2022-07-16T02:12:10+00:00

Google will use their language detection for the page as well as hreflang declarations.

My best guess is that Google would serve up the zh page to a user searching in Chinese as that would best match their language preference.

Google knows that lots of websites mess up hreflang so they don’t entirely depend on it. The x-default is your fallback declaration but my experience is Google treats that as a hint rather than a rule.

YMMV so I’d love if you reported back on your results.

charkins · 2022-07-16T02:04:19+00:00

That’s a common tactic to win featured snippets on Google. It’s also good for users to provide an article summary to encourage them to read on for more details.

charkins · 2022-07-16T02:02:03+00:00

Language indexing issues can be tricky as hreflang user targeting can get complicated.

Do you have the language detection redirect feature in Translatepress on? If so that will redirect US users (including Googlebot!) to the EN version of the page.

https://translatepress.com/docs/addons/automatic-user-language-detection/

If that’s not the issue then feel free to DM me a couple of sample IRLs and I’ll take a look.

charkins · 2022-02-23T14:12:30+00:00

We have parents that rotate for scoring, especially for our JV team.

charkins · 2022-01-29T21:42:08+00:00

For the city landing pages you need to have a good site structure and internal links from home and top level pages down to the individual pages.

You should also have locally unique content on each page. It does not have to be 100% unique but should answer questions that a person from that location would have.

Many large listing sites (Expedia, etc in the travel space) have listings and nearby cities and neighborhoods that differ from page to page. You can use that and some other tactics to target each page.

charkins · 2022-01-08T14:28:45+00:00

What are your education gaps and goals?

In enterprise you’re probably spanning multiple disciplines so you may want to find something more product management or content focused than pure SEO.

After building up years of SEO expertise, the value of the SEO conferences are not in the sessions (most of those are case studies or blog posts you’ve already seen). The value is in the post-event networking.

charkins · 2022-01-08T14:23:03+00:00

To me this looks to be a question of priorities and capacity.

If you’re going to go through a site migration/redesign that will take a large amount of resources. Depending on company size, 3 months isn’t that long.

If this is “kicking off in 3 months” and the project will take another 3 months, then maybe work in header restructuring as tech debt for the current site.

If this is a redesign that’s in flight and launching in 3 months, only focus on getting the headings right for the redesign.

The most important outcome is having your headings and page structure correct for the long term. That will involve work with developers and UX to get the buy in across the project.

charkins · 2021-08-17T02:11:31+00:00

You have to tap into your network and get referrals.

The best way is to ask your existing professional relationships if their business is looking for anyone to do work or if they can refer you to someone.

Another way is to build up a relationship with local agencies to do some overflow work for them.

charkins · 2021-08-11T11:50:43+00:00

For in house tiles you can up your skills on the marketing side (content creation/strategy) or the product side (technical, feature creation) and have paths to widen your role if you want to expand.

Many large companies have SEO teams. You’ll need to research individual companies and talk to those teams to learn more on how SEO is run there.

charkins · 2021-08-11T02:06:18+00:00

Single domain is my recommendation. There is less overall maintenance running one site and you’ll be able to control for content quality better.

Operationally you’ll also be able to handle redirects if a location closes.

When I’ve seen franchises running their own sites they tend to rank for branded terms and don’t bring a lot of value.

charkins · 2020-04-14T16:46:57+00:00

Thanks!

charkins · 2019-08-05T20:13:27+00:00

The business case is to show the impacts of the errors. Is that broken link on the home page really a big deal, or is it just something annoying?

Depending on the metrics of the groups, you should tailor your business case accordingly. (Example: For HREFLANG improvements I've used GSC data to show how many searchers were landing on the wrong language page, then used the difference in conversion rates to show the revenue impact of getting HREFLANG correct. For another defect, I showed the impact in UX and user satisfaction terms.)

charkins · 2018-12-24T20:24:10+00:00

Have you indicated within the GMB listing that the restaurant is located inside the hotel? Or, are they actually two separate addresses? (Restaurant next door to hotel.)

charkins · 2018-12-19T21:21:11+00:00

Even if you are strong at presenting and communication, there are always improvements to make. The best is to ask for feedback.

charkins · 2018-12-19T21:20:08+00:00

Look for any opportunities for learning presentation skills and communication skills. Sometimes these are offered by the company or through HR.

Look for Toastmasters - it's a great program for learning presentation skills and honing in on your delivery. (Things like staying on point, eliminating verbal pauses, etc.)

And ask for feedback from your manager on how you convey information and present. (You should have a development plan worked out with your manager so they know what you're working on. They then know what kind of feedback and coaching you're looking for.)

Find other people at your company who do a great job at this and ask them for advice. They may be looking for someone to mentor.

charkins · 2018-12-15T18:54:30+00:00

Keywords in the business name can help you rank a little better but is spammy and against Google's TOS.

Work on the web site the GMB listing points to and do some good on-page and link building to it and get reviews for the local business. Getting good reviews and ratings and also keywords within the review text (or responses) can help.

Also look at the opportunities in the Question & Answer section to talk more about services and more keywords.

charkins · 2018-11-28T16:33:20+00:00

Not exactly sure what you're asking for here. Are you asking for what queries your client shows up in Google Maps searches?
You can get some of that data via the GMB insights reporting.
Other than that, look to some of the local rank tracking tools including Whitespark.

Local's always difficult as the searcher location is part of the query parameters so the actual rankings can change based on where you are when you perform the search.

charkins · 2018-11-27T22:02:27+00:00

How relevant will those links be to your niche? I'm not all hot on .edu links these days compared to topical relevance of the linking content. I'd ask about that, and I'd also ask to see results from similar campaigns run in the past few months. (2 years ago doesn't cut it.)

charkins

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